In a photographer’s studio in Derby, Michael Socha is wondering what he should wear. He’s got a good jumper on, but he doesn’t like his jeans. He’s brought a couple of shirts from his mum’s, but they need a bit of an iron. No stylist for Socha; he has the busy air of a man who’s popped in between shifts, which he has, sort of. He lives close by, and is always on the go, “here, there and everywhere”. Aside from acting, and family, he practises muay thai and kickboxing. He’s doing his belts. “I’m on brown two for kickboxing at the moment, aiming for black belt in November,” he says. “When I’m not working, I’m quite active, there’s always something cracking off.”

And he brings a cracking energy: front foot, quick, friendly, though assessing. It made him stand out, even as a teenager. He was 17 when he appeared in Shane Meadows’s 2006 film This Is England and progressed to a bigger part in the three TV series, as Harvey, the blond-quiffed, white-jeaned bully turned raver. Since then, he’s rarely been out of work, with credits in The Unloved, Spike Island, Being Human, Once Upon a Time, The Aliens, Chernobyl and the forthcoming film Jericho Ridge: “I play a baddy. I often do, it’s my bread and butter.”

Still, he thinks he does his best work with Meadows, who requires his actors to improvise the whole script. Socha loves it: “When you’re doing it, it’s something special, it’s real. You never know what’s gonna happen, which is exciting and terrifying.” And in Meadows’s new three-part BBC Two series, The Gallows Pole, Socha plays the central role. He’s David Hartley, leader of the Cragg Vale Coiners, a group of 18th-century Yorkshire weavers and landworkers who, when threatened with destitution because of the Industrial Revolution, discover a way of making money. Literally: they counterfeit coins.

Hartley and the Coiners were real people; Hartley was known as King David. The part is a big deal for Socha, who originally went for a smaller role, but then phoned Meadows to see if he could try out for David. “He was at a point in his career where he wanted to play a part that consumed him,” Meadows texts me later. “One that scared him and would keep him awake at night. I could tell it was coming from the very centre of his being (rather than an actor looking for a slight upgrade), and he literally transformed. I’ve never seen anyone commit to a part quite like he did. I’m very thankful he made that call.”

The show grew out of the same-titled book by Benjamin Myers, though it’s less brutal, more egalitarian. It’s a prequel, set a few years before, with Hartley not so much a king as a reluctant prince. And Socha did commit: he read Myers’s book, plus as much as he could about Hartley and the era; did extensive accent research; lived and worked on a farm; walked all around Halifax, where the Coiners were. He changed his body: “Constantly in the gym, loads of protein shakes, horrible food.” He and the cast also learned the old ways of speaking – “quoit” for coat, “oil” for hole – though, in the show, they talk mostly in a modern manner. Meadows was less interested in period speech than in showing what life was like for ordinary people in an era when you could be hanged for stealing a handkerchief, or having a dirty face after 6pm.

Socha thinks the Coiners story has relevance to today. “Just the divide between the haves and the have-nots,” he says. “I keep thinking of when Rishi Sunak was in that shop, when he didn’t even know how to use his [bank] card. It doesn’t matter to him, whereas people are really looking at the prices of things. I’m surprised every time I go to the checkout now.”

He’s aware that his life is easy, compared with others’ – “If I tell some of my mates I’m being interviewed for a magazine, or doing a photoshoot, they’re like, ‘You fucking what?’” – but he hasn’t always found his job a doddle. When he was in his early 20s, he moved to Seven Sisters in north London – “I thought that was what I had to do” – and lived in a shared house with another actor. He hated it. “I don’t like living with people I don’t really know. That’s the done thing in London. I didn’t realise.” A little later, he spent a tough couple of years in Canada, on the fantasy series Once Upon a Time. They didn’t use him as much as he’d been promised, and he felt isolated. “The first year, I was fine, I was working a lot. The second year, I lost my mind.” It cured him of any ideas of Hollywood: “I’m not bothered about that at all. I just want to do what I genuinely want to do.”

So, he’s been back in Derby for years now (he’s private about his domestic situation, but he has kids). He’s recently started venturing a little way out of the town, into the countryside: “It’s great!” he says, surprised. When he was young, town was all he knew. He was out a lot from his early teens, getting into trouble. Did he fall in with the wrong people?

“No, I was the wrong people,” he says. “Me and my lot, it was very violent. A lot of fighting, drink and drugs around, it weren’t a very nice place. None of us were from conventional families, we’d all been in the shit. Our childhoods were just general violence, a place where you couldn’t back down from a fight, you had to fight. It was constant, all the fucking time: battles here, or that bloke’s after you, or called you whatever, and you’d have to sort that out. Derby was a battleground.”

At the time, he didn’t think there was an alternative: “We thought it had to be that way: in order to get money, you had to be a drug dealer, to get a pretty girlfriend, you had to do all these sort of things.”

It sounds very stressful, I say.

“It was. You couldn’t go to school the next day having said no to a fight, or running away. Sometimes, you’d get your head kicked in, just so when you went to school, they couldn’t say, he ran.”

He’d pretend to be ruthless – “I was a good actor, before I was an actor” – though, deep down, he knew he wasn’t. “I used to be jealous of people who didn’t have a conscience. I used to think, that’s how I want to be.” There were other things in his life: he loved his mum and his sister (Lauren, also an actor, known for Misfits), played football a bit, liked hip-hop and grime. When Socha was 16, his father died. Now he’s older, he realises that perhaps if his dad had been around, things might have been different.

“I thought of myself as quite an independent person,” he says. “As I look back, I think I was very easily manipulated and swayed by adults, by men. One bloke used to teach us how to fight, he was a boxing trainer. He’d get us fighting with mates, and make us fight each other. We were only kids. Thank fuck, my saviour came in acting, but still it took me a long time to get away completely.”

* * *

Socha started acting quite young, when a teacher spotted his potential. He tried out at a local children’s am-dram group and landed the main part in Bugsy Malone; but it was all “jazz hands” and over-keen parents, so he didn’t last. Instead, he found his feet at Nottingham’s Central Junior Television Workshop, where Samantha Morton and Vicky McClure also began their careers.

He got TV parts quite quickly and, for a while, had two lives. He remembers one time in particular, seeing himself on telly. “It was this video, this police awareness thing for schools,” he says. “The police were nicking me, but I was doing cannabis awareness videos for them. And I was watching TV in this dingy flat, with men, and the advert came on. They were like, ‘Fucking hell, is that what you do?’”

It was, and it is. He’s very grateful for it, though it took him until his early 20s to extricate himself from his old life entirely. Even then, he almost became a labourer – “I enjoyed it and I was getting paid really well” – until the acting took over. And for many years, he’d party hard, until he gave up drink. “Some people can go out, just have a couple of drinks. But for me, a lot of the time, it ended in disaster. So I took the disaster out of my life.”

All that energy has to burst through somewhere though, and he’s still up for schemes that seem sensible to him, but madcap to others. Last year, with his friend Badger, he walked from St Bees on the Cumbrian coast to Robin Hood’s Bay in North Yorkshire to raise money for charity. This year, he and Badger were planning on sailing the Atlantic. They enrolled on a sailing course.

“And this guy Jeremy said, have you had any experience? No? OK, well sailing the Atlantic is going to be a bit impossible. You’re not going to get the insurance. No one’s going to charter you a boat. Unless you’ve got half a million pounds to buy your own, then you’re very welcome to do what you want.”

Still, he let them do the course.

“Bless them, he did it for no money, they took us on these boats, little two-man-ers, on a lake,” says Socha. “We were doing all right for a bit. One point, I’m helming, switching, sorting out the mainsail, tacking, then we started going dead fast. We don’t understand why. So we’re going amazingly fast, but we don’t understand how to turn the boat, stop it. We capsized, Badger smacked into the mast and broke his ribs. So we said, let’s go back to hiking.”

So now they’re planning to do the Camino de Santiago, from the south-west of France to the north-west of Spain, in September. “It’s a pilgrim walk, 500 miles in 20 days. You’re not really supposed to do it like that, it’s quite a spiritual journey. We’re just banging it through, and wild camping.”

Not hostels?

“I don’t like staying with people I don’t know. Youth hostels, sleeping with a bunch of strangers, no thanks. And no sherpas, we’re going full bags on our backs. We went on a practice run on the South Downs, 100 miles in four days. Badger hurt his achilles, but if he collapses on the walk, there’ll be loads of pilgrims around to help.” He grins. “I love it. I’m having a great time. Sometimes work gets in the fucking way.”

• The Gallows Pole begins at 9pm on 31 May on BBC Two, with all episodes available immediately on iPlayer